Barely Caring: Art, Care and the End of the World
Sunshine Wong
Intro – The frustrations of care
Seven years ago, I was a PhD student and a new mother struggling with my practice and research on socially engaged art. Homing in on an acute sense of survival that co-existed with a desire for broader artistic and social relevance, I wanted to steer away from familiar domains – art and politics, subjectivity and labour – to sit with the ways contexts differently yielded or pushed back at an art project and its enablers. Exacerbated by the obligations of early parenthood, I felt that there was so much more to explore than what was conceptually elucidated by the reference materials I was reading. By this, I mean that there lacked an embodied criticality from within the practice: the half-felt or half-known experiences enacting what I came to think of as the “relational material” (Wong, 2019), the nebulous site in which the hopes and failures, ambitions and limits of artmaking with publics took place. Unconvinced by the bifurcating arguments of a “socially engaged art” that assessed its relevance based on aesthetic or political merit (Bishop, 2012; Kester, 2004 and 2011), I wanted to give as much credence to tacit yet trivialized knowledges made from the process. Colleagues who work with publics will, for instance, recognise how the unarticulated realities of a project creep up on you; how you awkwardly dance around the power you (do not) wield as an art practitioner; how often you’re attending to needs far beyond the project’s stated parameters.
The call of this issue’s title therefore spoke to me wryly, for the “gentle gestures” that came to my mind were the persistent exasperations in this field of work. I thought of care in particular, and its imbrication with what I termed “socially negotiated art” in my doctoral study. The motivation for this text, then, is to recap and reconsider a few nuances of these two ideas, especially in the current climate.
Part 1 – Love gone awry and a context for care
A number of questions I explored in my doctoral study have endured since its completion in 2019: the (after)life of “socially negotiated art” and the specificities of “care”, complicated since by the proliferation of therapy-speak and a global pandemic. My initial gripe was with a “socially engaged art” that poorly accounted for the materialities of its practice, ultimately leading me to propose a “socially negotiated art”, which I hoped would better attend to the cruel optimism and ambivalences of this work (Berlant 2011). While word-salady, the term served as a starting point for a more yielding and less presumptuous framework, leading me to queer, feminist and affect studies for alternative cues. The primacy of self-reflexivity in these areas gave me the first tools to consider dimensions of my own practice that I found hard to confront but needed to (project failures; struggling with and against burnout; feeling irrelevant). At the same time, I was also reading up on Paulo Freire and radical pedagogy, a field of social and political practice that similarly troubled institutional norms. Compelled by three of his key concepts – dialogue, love and praxis – I was keen, in turn, to trouble them in ways that reflected the ambivalences I felt in doing this work. The reworkings of dialogue, love and praxis then became the core of my study.
As mutable as it is vital, love was (and continues to be) my favourite concept to take apart and put back together. For the study, it took on different modalities, including “intimate publics” that produce “immediacy and solidarity by establishing in the public sphere an affective register of belonging” (Berlant, 2011, p.225); “precarious rapture” (Joy, 2014) of bodies moving in protest and in counterpublic swells; and care, which, as an extension of affective labour and the mothering I was coming to grips with, felt increasingly inextricable from a socially negotiated art.
Care brought into view the labour of bodily renewal and legacy, a support system that Elizabeth Freeman sees as an integral part of queer life. Where family or other social structures have broken, and access to nurture blocked, queer kinships can offer a lifeline. She describes them as “a set of representational and practical strategies for accommodating all the possible ways one human being’s body can be vulnerable and hence dependent upon that of another” (Freeman, 2007, p.298) – in my mind, this looked like forms of communing, gathering, playing and listening, all of which fall within the purview of a socially negotiated art.
The linking of care to interbodily dependence to practice: this through-line brought to bear the low status of socially negotiated art projects, not to mention the low pay relative to the multiple levels of skills, commitment and organising needed. At the same time, the connection shone a light on the gravely lopsided “care chain”, a term that Arlie Russell Hochschild uses (2012) to interrogate the distribution and outsourcing of caring labour. Her description of the “emotion-deaf arrangements” that result from a “profit-seeking drive for efficiency” (ibid, p.xi-xii) struck a chord amidst the mothering I was learning to perform: the patience and intricacies involved, having to work around but being forever tethered to these duties, allowed for meniality and the extradomestic to emerge as adjacent ideas.
Interlude – Meniality and the world-at-home
Meniality became a crucial qualifier for the care I was thinking of in socially negotiated art, not to denigrate the practitioners, project intentions or the work, but
as a means of recognising the place it occupies within the larger landscape. When projects perform rather basic kinds of care that are otherwise absent, what are they doing exactly? They are providing affection and attention, space and patience, extending the home-as-premise into the artwork, muddling the division normally placed between personal and public realms. The question then becomes how home and work is distinguished if, reiterating queer and feminist critique, the foundation is social dependence. This takes us to “the extradomestic”, a misappropriation of Silvia Federici’s descriptor of labour beyond the household (Federici, 2012), to rethink the categories of life from the pivot of home. Looking askance at our supposed “soul at work” (Berardi, 2009), I argued with unintentional prescience for the “globalising [of] the home space – or ‘the world-at-home’” (Wong, 2019); thanks to platforms like Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Instagram, etc., the “home” of the 2010s was already exerting a “material prowess […] over the contradictions of life and work” (ibid.), embodying both financial autonomy and flexibility.
Just as I was about to re-enter the workplace after a period of introspective research and mothering, COVID-19 pulled the rug out from under us. This, indeed, meant that we – as in everyone, worldwide – were advised to stay home. We were told only to enter public spaces for essentials: shopping for food and daily exercise. The pandemic brought to light its constituents, including collectivity, susceptibility and, of course, care. Suddenly, what felt like a quiet gambit in a study on a peripheral art practice started to loom large, setting the scene of my curatorial work to come.
Part 2 – Practising shared attentiveness
Let’s describe the contemporary conditions in which care has become the key affective valence through which my peers (in education and the arts) and I have been framing our work: in 2024, climate catastrophe feels unavoidable and the state-sanctioned genocide of Palestinians is taking place unquestioned by the most powerful governments internationally. It all feels brutally out of time, in that everything is now both too late and too soon; everything is always already urgent and the grief and horror have long surpassed words. Of course there have been pervasive calls to care.
At the small arts organisation where I started working not long before the pandemic hit, we have been grappling unsteadily with care on an infrastructural level, while having to prove ourselves “NPO-ready” (National Portfolio Organisation: a list of organisations recognised by the Arts Council England for multi-year funding). I have been bowled over in many ways, by the inventive adaptability with which art workers respond to a frankly untenable cultural reality, but also by the pervasiveness of trauma, which bleeds through more than occasionally into curatorial support. A production meeting becomes pastoral support becomes DMs and texts at odd hours, because technology enables extradomestic relations with productivity that make it hard to clearly delineate moments of restoration – or, in the parlance of the 2020s, of self-care. Indeed, facilitating embedded and socially negotiated art projects requires a lot of time and energy. But it also requires a kind of shared attentiveness generated by the group that is hard to explain or cultivate in a western, neoliberal context, perversely made even more self-centred after the pandemic. I am still learning how, as a curator but also as an immigrant from Hong Kong, I can better advocate for this sense of East Asian “other-orientation”, to heighten collective respect and attunement. That could be the next stage of my research.
More broadly, peer organisations are looking laterally, striking up conversations and initiating resource sharing networks to renourish a camaraderie eroded by years of competitive arts funding. Some have been introducing a more holistic and/or more interrogative regard of care into their work: through “ecological awareness” and “positive social action” (Arts Catalyst, Sheffield, quoting their website); through “solidarity” and “a care-based ethos” (NewBridge, Newcastle, quoting their website); and through critical approaches to care (the Care research group at Royal College of Art and their anthology “On Care”, as well as “Care(less): A Supplement to On Care”). The dedication to listening and strengthening connections is creating a more interdependent arts sector, allowing knowledge and experiences, funds and assets to move a little more freely between organisations.
Part 3 – Reorientation
Whether in implicit or conscious response, I now find myself in tighter circles of sociality in my real and digital lives. My friends and I visit each other at home; I subscribe to Substacks and take part in whisper networks on Discord. These feel like the safe spaces of now, affording higher levels of attention and response. Because when one is constantly made to declare one’s cultural and socio-political allegiance, there leaves little room for figuring out complexity, for making mistakes. Care is far too frequently confounded by alarm, taking the form of statements and open letters that one encounters above all in digital form, in a neurologically-fracturing, attention-hungry information landscape (Odell, 2019). Collectivity is galvanised on mainstream social media platforms, whose algorithms reward the most extreme and narcissistic content (Lorenz, 2023). With an utter collapse between information and infrastructure, care is sucked into everything else vying for our attention, taking on weird shapes so telling of our present: performance, anxiety and disillusionment, to name a few.
In the nauseating multiplication of forms and meanings around care, meniality and the extradomestic can be temporarily grounding. “Temporarily”, because I don’t pretend to exact a defining grip on care, knowing that as a tangent of love, it will always be (slightly) unhinged. What these frameworks can do is remind me and any willing actors, for a moment, of the repercussions our behaviours produce: where meniality anchors our actions to the materially restorative (are we nourishing bodies? Giving life?), the extradomestic critically questions how we split our resources between others and self (where are our limits and what can we afford? What constitutes our work and our home? What do we say no to?). I hope they function a little like a compass that you use when things feel disorienting, only to be put away again until the next time you need it.
About the author
Sunshine Wong is an art worker and researcher. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she now lives in Sheffield and is Co-Director (Programme) at Bloc Projects. Their practice concerns marginality, critical care approaches, and how contemporary art makes a place for itself in public life.
Bibliography
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London, New York: Verso.
Federici, S. (2012) Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press.
Freeman, E. (2007) Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory. in Haggerty, G.E. and McGarry, M. (eds.) A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies. Oxford, Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, pp.295-314.
Hochschild, A.R. (2012) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. Reprint, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.
Jagoe, R. and Kivland, S. (eds) (2020) On Care. London: Ma Bibliothèque.
Joy, J. (2014) The Choreographic. Cambridge, London: MIT Press.
Kester, G. (2011) The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context. Durham, London: Duke University Press.
Kester, G. (2004) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lorenz, T. (2023) Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence and Power on the Internet. London: WH Allen.
Odell, J. (2019) How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Brooklyn: Melville House.
Wong, Y.C.S. (2019) Beside Engagement: a queer and feminist reading of socially negotiated art through dialogue, love and praxis. Doctor of Philosophy Thesis, University of Wolverhampton. Unpublished copy.